1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to financial data and, more particularly, to a system and method for rendering data.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (the Act) is legislation that affects corporate governance, financial disclosure and the practice of public accounting. The Act was signed into law largely in response to numerous corporate accounting scandals. The Act requires executives, boards of directors and auditors to take precise measures to bring about greater corporate accountability and transparency.
In the electronic format, a file containing a financial statement is usually not coded to indicate the type of information represented by each line or column of text. In order to have a computer extract the desired information from the file, the content of the file has to be identified. That is, the various tables in the file have to be recognized and the content within each table has to be parsed and broken down to their constituent parts.
Once the data is recognized and broken down, it can be normalized and manipulated. For example, the normalized data can be placed in a spreadsheet program or a database program. The performance of the company can then be illustrated and analyzed by various mathematical, statistical, or financial models within the functional capabilities of the spreadsheet program. The relationship between various financial statement entries can be compared and hypothetical situations can be generated and tested. Furthermore, industry analysis can be performed as well by gathering and collating data from the financial statements of several companies. Thus, there is great incentive for identifying and parsing the content of a file containing a financial statement.
A spreadsheet is a programming tool specifically adapted to the manipulation of financial data and provides a rich programming and modeling environment using a number of tools and macros that are familiar to most users of financial data. The cells of a spreadsheet can be used to store both data and formulas for manipulating data. And, as spreadsheet functionality is improved, users familiar with the capabilities of their particular spreadsheet program become dependent on those functions. An example of the improved functionality of spreadsheet programs, U.S. Pat. No. 6,779,151 to Cahill et al., incorporated by reference herein for all purposes, provides for a spreadsheet program that will recognize new object data types, i.e., those in addition to the typical spreadsheet data types such as numbers, texts, date, Boolean and error, and store the new object data types in the cells of the spreadsheet. There have also been inventions developed to parse data and render such data in a spreadsheet, such as U.S. Pat. No. 5,893,131 to Kornfeld for a method and apparatus for parsing data, incorporated by reference herein for all purposes, and U.S. application Ser. No. 086522, U.S. publication no. 20030037038 to Block et al. for a method for adding metadata to data, incorporated by reference herein for all purposes.
In the past, in order to obtain the utility provided by a spreadsheet with financial data such as that supplied to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a spreadsheet user would “copy and paste” the relevant information from a document from a data provider into the spreadsheet for further use and analysis. Not only was this process cumbersome and time consuming, but it also allows the introduction of data errors into the spreadsheet. In addition, there was no method for reversing the process from the spreadsheet program to the online data provider.
To facilitate the flow of corporate financial information from public companies to analysts, regulators and investors, Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) was developed. XBRL is a meta-data standard or data that describes data. That is, an XBRL tag associated with a number or text describes the meaning of the data. For example, assume that a company announces that it produced $5.7 Mil. in 2003. With no context, it is difficult to determine what the number in this statement relates to. It could mean, for example, the company's revenue, gross margin, executive salaries, etc. However, XBRL can be used to place a tag indicating that the 5.7 Mil. represents revenue for the year 2003.
XBRL is quickly becoming a global standard for the preparation of financial information for facilitating its transfer and ease of usability. XBRL tags financial information so that it can be tracked from interactions with vendors, etc. and so that it can readily be used in reports for operating divisions of a company, consolidated earnings releases, etc. Systems have been developed for converting financial documents into XBRL. For example, Rivet Software has developed a system called “Dragon Tag” that is used for this purpose. There are also other companies that provide XBRL tagged data. For example, Edgar Online provides XBRL-tagged SEC filing data and OneSource provides access to U.K. financial data in XBRL.
One goal of the push to derive such a standard for financial information is to enable an entire new generation of Web services that will make it easier for financial analysts and regulators to locate problems in financial data, executives to compare their company to competitors, and analysts to identify performing stocks.
Documents such as financial documents often include information besides that in the main body of the document. This information is referred to herein as “associated information”. This associated information may include, for example, footnotes, head notes, management discussion, etc. Although the associated information may not be included in the main body of the financial document, it may nevertheless contain important information that can be useful when evaluating the financials of a company.
It would be beneficial to enable users to view the associated information along with the information in the main body of a document so that the associated information can be viewed in context.